Citizen science in hydrology and water resources: opportunities for knowledge generation, ecosystem service management, and sustainable development

TLDR

Citizen science involves public participation in research design, data collection, and interpretation, and recent advances in sensing, data processing, and communication have expanded opportunities for such engagement, particularly in hydrology where low‑cost, robust sensors enable unprecedented data collection, though data quality can differ markedly from traditional monitoring. The paper reviews the current state of citizen science in hydrology and evaluates its potential to complement conventional data collection and knowledge generation for water resources management. The authors conduct a literature review and assess how citizen‑science initiatives can augment traditional hydrological monitoring and inform decision‑making. The review concludes that citizen‑science data can generate new insights into process heterogeneity, remote regions, and human impacts on the water cycle, but also present challenges in data quality, uncertainty quantification, and decision support, necessitating careful project design and integration with existing knowledge to avoid contestation of community institutions.

Abstract

The participation of the general public in the research design, data collection and interpretation process together with scientists is often referred to as citizen science. While citizen science itself has existed since the start of scientific practice, developments in sensing technology, data processing and visualisation, and communication of ideas and results, are creating a wide range of new opportunities for public participation in scientific research. This paper reviews the state of citizen science in a hydrological context and explores the potential of citizen science to complement more traditional ways of scientific data collection and knowledge generation for hydrological sciences and water resources management. Although hydrological data collection often involves advanced technology, the advent of robust, cheap and low-maintenance sensing equipment provides unprecedented opportunities for data collection in a citizen science context. These data have a significant potential to create new hydrological knowledge, especially in relation to the characterisation of process heterogeneity, remote regions, and human impacts on the water cycle. However, the nature and quality of data collected in citizen science experiments is potentially very different from those of traditional monitoring networks. This poses challenges in terms of their processing, interpretation, and use, especially with regard to assimilation of traditional knowledge, the quantification of uncertainties, and their role in decision support. It also requires care in designing citizen science projects such that the generated data complement optimally other available knowledge. Lastly, we reflect on the challenges and opportunities in the integration of hydrologically-oriented citizen science in water resources management, the role of scientific knowledge in the decision-making process, and the potential contestation to established community institutions posed by co-generation of new knowledge.